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I know it’s a lot to ask, but…

Hello!

I’m taking a moment of your time today to ask if someone out there with the skills and the desire could help me out on a project related to the Converging Forces story I’m writing.

If not, I’ll tackle it myself of course, I’m simply hoping someone that already has skill and practise at this would be able to do it far faster and with less effort. Someone that wouldn’t be reinventing the wheel, or some other tired cliché.

What I’d like to do is have the Converging Forces story, as it stands so far, placed into a single combined form that I could post for download, suitable for reading on Kindle or another similar platform.

I’ve had a a few folks mention that they’d love to read it and get up to date, but even with a chapter page, it’s a bit… big. And hard to come back to. A portable version would certainly help.

Obviously, this isn’t a project looking for a finished ‘for sale’ kind of anything. I’ve been focused on speed writing when I’ve been doing the turns, not on anything remotely resembling a final polish. When what I consider the first ‘book’ of the storyline has been reached, that’s when I’ll go back and being, well, fixing the bloody thing so it’s actually readable without a billion jarring spelling and grammar mistakes, and terribly disoriented tense transitions.

I have NOT researched how to do it myself, not have I researched what it takes to format something so it can go on portable devices. Should you not have the time to do it for me, but DO know HOW to do it or where I can find a detailed guide, that would be awesome as well.

Just chiming in to echo the recommendation above for Sigil and Calibre. Sigil if needed for actual editing, Calibre for conversion type stuff. I’ve used both to get things into Epub format. I’d say start with Calibre and if you need to do something you can’t do in Calibre, open up Sigil 🙂
-Ben

As someone mentioned above. Copy the text to a word format and use Bullzip PDF Printer to get it to pdf form. Then download Stanza for desktop and you can convert the .pdf into a kindle format, epub, or just about any other format. I get most of my reading material as .pdf’s and use this method to get it to proper digital format. I could probably even do it for you and email you the digital format. It should only take a couple of hours.

What I’m trying to do right now is get the next big portion of Terin’s current story line done and posted, and THEN do a PDF/Kindle/Ebook thing with it. That’ll give me some mental space to keep going.

I assume that you are wanting this to be a regular book, as opposed to a graphic novel available for download. I only bring that up because i’ve read several parts of the story and instantly thought, “That would be awesome draw.” At which point the images can be saved as a format for mobile devices in a similar fashion to text…i believe.

Just a thought, If you like it hit me up a Bakaryuustudios at gmail.com

Actually, manny and I had always envisioned this as a graphic novel or anime style story, about the scenes and imagery as much as the written story.

We simply don’t know any artists ourselves, and every artist I do meet have always seemed to be drawn far more into bringing their own ideas to life than to be in a long-term project like creating a graphic novel or webcomic, especially a project where the story that is advancing the plot is being written by someone else.

Would you mind if i sifted through the story to find some of the descriptions of characters, or if you are able to send some, so i could do some rough concepts. My overall dream so to speak is to do a comic or a series of comics, but i haven’t got a literary bone in my body.

If you want i can scan in and send you some of my work, either some little one page comics like i did when you had the bearwall about the email ages ago. Or i can send you some of my character designs on my own.

If i’m appearing need i apologize, I’ve just been looking for a writer.

Regardless of what you’d like to do, I’d be delighted to have a chance to see some of your artwork, simply to enjoy it. I always like seeing the things people create. My email is thebigbearbutt@gmail.com

I also advise Calibre. It’s great for collating elements into an ebook format, adding covers, loading metadata etc. If you want a tool to edit in the ebook (epub) format, take a look at Sigil. Its a bit of a learning curve to start but pretty powerful once you get going with it. GL BBB 🙂

You can take a word doc (or anything else that has a print option in windows) and “print” it to a PDF for free. Well, for free if you don’t mind the adds (which I don’t). If you wanna buy it, it costs. . . hmmm, $9.95.

If you’re publishing for Kindle, make sure that you don’t add pictures with text wrap and all that stuff or different “pretty” fonts. When you upload it to kdp.amazon.com for publishing to the Kindle, Amazon automagically converts it to like an HTML or something and it REALLY screws up if you have any special formatting. I’m getting ready to upload v3 of my wife’s children’s book that she is publishing to Kindle because she wanted it to be pretty. :0)
BTW, you can also go to createspace.com (another of the amazon sites) when you get it ready for publishing and upload it there for free. They will put it on the paperback section of amazon for sale and if it sales, they print a copy and ship it to the person and pay you a royalty. Woot!
Hope that this helps.

Many portable devices support pdf. Kindle does, and so does the iphone/ipad ebook application. You simply put the story into something like Word and then download a programme called Cutepdf. You then turn your word document into a pdf by ‘printing’ to pdf using the print settings. Its what I use for the gear list (from Excel) and its incredibly easy to do. You then just carry on updating the word document and produce a new pdf when you want to update it.

The only feedback I can offer is that a mate of mine sends me pdf files that my kobo picks up as documents rather than ebooks. It does create a few limitations in terms of resizing, but I’ve found the A4 pages squished to kobo screen sizes more than readable. I don’t think he does anything special to them.

PS – if you need someone to go though and format for the kindle, I’d be happy to help out. Just send me a message. I’ll dig the stuff together (unless you have it all saved) and see if I can’t get a good Kindle version done.

Thank you. As with everything in this life, everything is always far more complicated. Now that I’ve had a chance to read through all these forums and guides and instructions and stuff, the one thing that comes to mind is…

How come so many of the ebooks I’ve seen haven’t made any use of ANY of this? It sure would have been nice if the ones I bought had any of this formatting.

The latter is a matrix that helps identify what tool can be used for converting format to format for ebooks – what you’re wanting to do. Use this in conjunction with Joe Konrath’s site (mentioned by Imraith Dos Santos) to let you do it your way.